Tara's Project Proposal
For my final paper, I am interested in writing about religious procession as a form of tourism. I want to look at the Easter Passion procession, and how normative space is re-imagined through ritualized movement. The passion processional is when a congregation moves from one designated site to another, stopping to enact an interpretation of a station of the cross. Through this communal experience worshipers are able to visit another time and place outside of their own temporality. I am curious how notions about how tourism, as a self-reflective brake with one’s own quotidian life and a consumption of the ‘other’, is realized in a mystical experience.
Currently I am deciding which Easter procession to observe this spring. At the moment there are two that interest me. One is in the Bronx at St. Joseph's Church. “Nearly 3,000 people join this theatrical procession, which ends by re-enacting the crucifixion on a "mountain" near Crotona Park. Since 1970, St. Joseph's has performed the Stations of the Cross ritual in the streets of the South Bronx. Forty people in costume dramatize the ritual in Spanish, with full performances of the Catholic Biblical characters at each Station.” The intense theatricality of this procession interests a great deal, I can really focus on performance elements in a religious context.
The other procession is at St. Teresa Church in Queens. “In this South Ozone Park neighborhood, the Good Friday procession and ritual is performed in English in the morning and Spanish, and French/Creole in the evening. At each stop, members of the parish give personal testimony related to the theme of the Station. Traditional hymns and prayers are offered in one or all of the languages, and the cross and other items associated with the crucifixion are carried. Along the way, neighbors step outside to pray while the procession passes.” I really am attracted to the multi-culturalism of this procession. I would be curious to tease out the way which each culture interprets the passion through a slightly different lens. Also, the way that different cultures push-up against each other in this communal experience. Another element that I am interested in is how parishioners offer their own testimony to faith, and how this story-telling performs in tangent with the embodiment of myth in the process of re-signifying the space.